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Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E18: 200% Happier with Mia Birk

Friday, November 9, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in southeast Portland with Mia Birk, author of Joyride: Pedaling Toward a Healthier Future and President of Alta Planning + Design, which strives to make biking, walking, and mass transit an integral part of daily life. The discuss exactly how much happier he would have been riding a bicycle to the interview than riding a bus; the way Portland “got the ball rolling” for its cycling infrastructure development in the nineties; the moments of surprising hostility she found upon first pedaling down Portland streets; bicycle infrastructure as a facilitator of cooperation; how to extend enthusiasm for cycling beyond the guys in Lance Armstrong spandex to those who simply need to get somewhere; the ill effects of America’s having spent decades incentivizing driving, and exactly how European cities like Copenhagen pulled so far ahead; how she gauges the cycling in a new town, asking first to see “the good, the bad, and the ugly”; the importance of creating conditions of delight for riding in a city, and the need to re-teach the occasional public official how to use a bike before doing so; how the declared identity of a city affects the implementation of cycling within it; how she finds you can fit “a little party” into every day; and what, exactly, to do when you turn up in Portland yourself, jonesing to ride.

Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed or on iTunes.

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Kansai no Nikki I

Thursday, November 8, 2012

At some point, I was just delaying going to Japan. Making the journey, once a faint but seemingly unrealizable desire, passed silently into inevitability. The question of Japan turned from whether to when, and from when to how often. This dual-purpose round of Notebook on Cities and Culture interview-gathering and mandatory birthday departure from the homeland, as it approached, didn’t loom as My Trip to Japan. I’ll remember it as My First Trip to Japan, certainly, and indeed My First Trip to Asia (Unlesss You Count Living in Koreatown). But even now, in the middle of it, I understand that it simply starts my lifetime count of total hours logged in Japan ticking.

“You aren’t going to get lost?” asked my mom before I left the States. On the contrary; not only would I get lost, likely several times per day, but I would make doing so my first priority. I know of no more educational way to travel than simply heading off in any direction — often directly away from my destination — and seeing how things shake out. I’ve never learned anything, not in a lasting way, while getting directly from point A to point B. Doing the opposite works best when traveling solo, or alongside an easygoing companion. Roaming back and forth between meetings in Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, and Nara, the four major cities of western Japan’s Kansai region, I’ve made a point of turning up hours early in order to lose my way, and, ultimately, to gain a firmer grasp of place. As with geography, so with information: “Efficient search,” once tweeted Aaron Haspel, “is serendipity’s implacable enemy.”

My first impulse to enter Japan through Osaka, the country’s boisterous, Chicago-esque “second city,” came when Momus publicly pondered moving there himself:

I’ve never seriously thought about living in Osaka before. I love Tokyo best of all. But increasingly, my outlook has Berlinified, by which I mean I regard expensive cities like New York, London and Tokyo as unsuited to subculture. They’re essentially uncreative because creative people living there have to put too much of their time and effort into the meaningless hackwork which allows them to meet the city’s high rents and prices. So disciplines like graphic design and television thrive, but more interesting types of art are throttled in the cradle.

[ … ]

Despite its shabby bits, Osaka is a vastly wealthy city (if it were a country, it would be one of the world’s richest) with a vulgar commercial energy Berlin can’t begin to match. Osaka is massive, industrious and dense, and there are businesses here that cater to every imagineable human whim, and that don’t close on Sundays. And if you want to escape the density and intensity, well, the mountains of Shikoku aren’t far.

The day after my arrival, I went to visit a friend of mine who, through 25 years of tourist visas, makes his part-time home in Nara. He wisely urged me to minimize my days in the garish concrete maze of Osaka and maximize my days  amid the lightly worn yet deep history and quiet natural beauty of Kyoto. Contrarian to the core, I responded that, if I’m to spend time in the most refined and civilized country on Earth, I long to experience the height of its vulgarity. Yet I wouldn’t entirely dismiss this as my own haphazard justification. Isn’t there genuine fascination — genuine value — in concentrating on the dot of yang within the yin, the dot of yin within the yang? “The interesting lies in the in-between,” said the German-language Japanese novelist Yoko Tawada. That’s precisely why when this same friend, showing me around his thoroughly Japanese neighborhood, asked if I’d like to eat some Californian food, I jumped at the chance.

Yet even in the allegedly vulgarian, consumption-driven metropolis of Osaka — “the stomach of Japan” — a westerner can neither ignore nor escape this high civilization. From what my explorations have so far shown me, the Japanese sense of convenience penetrates everywhere and everything. Of all the countless amenities that result, I’ve grown most used to — indeed, now feel entitled to — beverage vending machines on the street. They come full of not just hot and cold coffee and tea, but cans of corn and azuki bean soup as well. I’ve quoted David Sedaris on the subject before, and now I’ll return to Momus:

Cool sugarfree green tea dispensed from machines on every corner. Why don’t we have this in the West? Because Western inequality means the streets are full of poor people who would smash the machines for the coins inside. Also, Western people like sugar, and sugarless drinks would quickly be discontinued for lack of sales. As with all these things, it’s not a question of importing Japanese technology, but of importing the Japanese mind. What’s more, while you can have a few of these things in your private home, ultimately the West cannot have them until they can exist in public space.

I landed at Itami, the older of the two large airports near Osaka, which immediately confirmed my hopes of seeing a slightly older, less polished urban Japan. Everything around me seemed to have been manufactured twenty to forty years ago. I boarded a train and thrilled at its stretches of avocado green seat fabric and wood-grained wall plastic. Yet all of it also looked and felt surreally well-maintained. Every westerner I talk to about the vending machines — and I talk to all of them about the vending machines — says a variation on the same thing: back home, people would trash those things! Nobody seems inclined to trash anything in Japan; the public trusts itself to treat the country as, well, its home. Later, I learned that the locals regard Itami as the “bad” airport, the one whose unpresentable dinginess fills them with shame.

From Itami on, every hour in Japan has presented another reason to let my face drop into my palm and mutter, back toward America, “Why can’t we have nice things?” But part of me knows full well that I couldn’t live as a unit of a population that regards itself as one big family. A public that won’t trash things is a public that, for a variety of reasons, can’t trash things. I bear no obligation from the complex, burdensome social contract that allows the Japanese clean streets, washlets, trains that show up, pedestrian bridges, subway-station bathrooms, and green-tea vending machines. Yet the society can’t stop non-participating me — the dot of yang in their yin? — from enjoying these same luxuries. Walking through the supposedly unrefined embarrassment that is Osaka, a city that has yet to show me so much as a piece of garbage, I accept that, despite Japan’s considerable expensiveness, I’m freeloading.

 

[Previous diaries: Seattle 2012, Portland 2012, San Francisco 2012, Mexico City 2011]

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E17: Grueling Whittling with Mike Russell

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in northwest Portland with comic artist and film critic Mike Russell, co-host on the Cort and Fatboy podcast, creator of Culturepulp, Mr. Do and Mr. Don’t, The Sabertooth Vampire, and more. They discuss the excruciating process of drawing an interview; his adaptation of a page of David Foster Wallace’s “Up, Simba”; what it’s like to artistically live-blog the Portland Opera; the unusual robustness of the Portland comics industry, and its incentivization of “putting comics where they shouldn’t be”; his current task of drawing a comic for a set of European finance ministers; the origins of Portland podcasting, and how he became a part; how Star Wars formed at least part of his cinematic consciousness, and what it takes to grow up into an astute genre fan; the worrisome effects of nostalgia and “remix culture”; the Portland “put it out there, what the hell” attitude; Portlandia‘s proper title of Southeast Portlandia, and how Los Angeles still sees the dream of the nineties as alive in the city; Portland as an undrying source of drawable weirdness; and the quintessentially Portland sport of “hashing,” or taking runs from bar to bar, drinking beer at each.

Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed or on iTunes.

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Podthoughts: Little Atoms

Monday, October 29, 2012

Vital stats:
Format: interviews about ideas, science, rationality, and senses of place
Episode duration: 25m-1h30m
Frequency: sometimes weekly, sometimes biweekly

Little Atoms [RSS] [iTunes] used to describe itself as a conversation about “conspiracy theories, cosmology, religion, the new age, human rights, and the state of the left.” Surely you can sense where that list hits a sour note. Conspiracy theories, cosmology, religion, and the new age fall into the wheelhouse of any show about truth and falsity. Podcasting, the medium that brought us the slightly wearying procession of Skeptoid, Skepticality, Skeptiko, and so on (you ultimately end up atSkepchick), has more than welcomed this sort of thing. Human rights, as a subject, can receive interesting or uninteresting treatment depending upon the context. But the very last thing I hope to hear when I hit play on my iPod is an earnest discussion of the state of the left. And I have no particular love for the right, so perhaps this illustrates the left’s whole problem. Implying that the left has a natural place in the grand separation of fact and delusion brings back to my mouth the bitter disappointment I tasted after momentarily believing the hype about leftism as the politics of the thinking man. We realize later in life that, alas, no -ism truly permits the thinking man.

Hence, I imagine, Little Atoms’ modified current opener, which more broadly but much more appealingly promises a show “about ideas and culture, with an emphasis on ideas of the Enlightenment.” You could describe this as a program about science and rationality, if you concentrate on certain episodes: Ben Goldacre on evidence-based medicine [MP3], Christopher Hitchens on atheism [MP3], Lisa Randall on cosmology [MP3], James Randi on pseudoscience [MP3], Mark Henderson on “why science matters” [MP3]. But in my experience, podcasts exclusively concerned with that can turn oddly pious; you can only listen to so much veneration of the scientific enterprise before beginning to feel you’ve lost its context. The pursuit of the truth, though one of the more robust single justifications one can muster for one’s work, strikes me as not quite a wide enough slice of the human experience. I would gladly take the side of logic, reason, and reality, but man, some of the guys on that team dress like real schlubs.

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E16: Reality’s More Interesting with Thom Andersen

Saturday, October 27, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with Thom Andersen, professor at the California Institute of the Arts’ School of Film/Video and director of films including Red Hollywood, the new Reconversion, and the well-known documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, on the truth and falsity of the city’s representation in motion pictures. They discuss The Fast and the Furious shooting on his street; the end of the current era of impressive car chases crafted by Nicolas Winding Refn and Quentin Tarantino; H.B. Halicki’s original Gone in 60 Seconds, and the importance of its literalism regarding greater Los Angeles’ South Bay; how rarely mainstream cinematic interest looks beyond white people of “immodest means,” and what the films that do go beyond them achieve (such as the creation of detective films that actually involve detecting); Killer of Sheep, Boyz n the Hood, and the differences between garden-variety “gang movies” and those that truthfully deal with survival; the questions to do with the black population, bank bailouts, and the destruction of the working class he believes movies could address but rarely do; how much more interesting reality is than our imaginations, which by now have long since filled up with junk; Los Angeles as a representational battleground, and the way filmmakers have an alibi here not to do important work; the native’s lack of advantage in understanding this city, and the outsider’s advantage in making it strange again, as seen in Zabriskie Point, The Outside Man, Model Shop, and Point Blank; the changes in Los Angeles, how they vanish in comparison to the changes in major Asian cities, and how they have for the most part taken place among the people rather than in the infrastructure; the racism of Crash versus the naïveté of Falling Down; his continuing fascination with the Los Angeles wherein people struggle to make a living; and what fillms and books can to do change minds, given that they so often make minds in the first place.

Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed or on iTunes.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E15: Places are People with Ben Casnocha

Monday, October 22, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco’s South Beach with entrepreneur, author, blogger, traveler, and learner Ben Casnocha. His latest book, co-written with Reid Hoffman, chairman of LinkedIn, is The Start-Up of You. They discuss the advantages of hanging an IKEA world map on the wall; his ten days of silent meditation and the feeling of enlarged thumbs that resulted; the San Francisco Bay Area’s convergence of Californian spirituality and Californian technological intensity; the three Californias: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and everything else; “NorCal” pride and State of Jefferson stickers; being the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and how that got him involved in technology startups to begin with; how where you physically live now matters both more and less than it used to (and who still lives virtually on Livejournal); how loyalty now extends horizontally to your network rather than vertically to your company, and how your identity now comes before your role as an organizational component; his lifelong habit of reaching out to interesting people, and how it differs from the standard sleaziness of “networking”; his visits to Detroit and Athens, and how those cities may have strained his appreciative thinking muscles; his interest in underrated and underdiscussed places as well as people, such as those in South America; his adoption of “home bases” around the world, be they in San Francisco, Santiago, Zurich, or Tokyo; the pronunciation of Tegucigalpa; the loneliness he sees deep in the eyes of people who declare themselves “nomadic”; the necessity of acting consistently on curiosity, and of cultivating both a highly technical and a highly nontechnical mind; whether moving to a city means moving to randomness; and his sensory-deprivation experience floating in a saltwater pod.

Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed or on iTunes.

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Podthoughts: Blank on Blank

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Vital stats:
Format: the bits of interviews you weren’t meant to hear
Episode duration: 5m-11m
Frequency: weekly

“For journalists of all stripes, we are helping them realize the untapped potential of their work as dynamic, fresh content in a new, rapidly changing multimedia world.” You’ll easily find this lightly tortured phrase on the about page of Blank on Blank [RSS] [iTunes], though you may struggle to draw meaning from it. The verbiage farther down inspires little more confidence, describing the show’s goal of “creating a sustainable nonprofit media model through a combination of corporate sponsors, underwriters, grants, foundation support, private donations, licensing agreements, production fees, and media partnerships.” On the surface, this seems appealing enough; inside my head, I at best hear the garbled, mystifying drone of Charlie Brown’s teacher, and at worst view the howling abyss into which anyone’s knowledge about the future and even nature of media and journalism have fallen.

Put straight, Blank on Blank podcasts bits and pieces of interviews that didn’t make it into their intended contexts. It offers snippets of previously conducted conversations (sometimes long previously conducted ones) with well-known figures, selected to showcase particularly unguarded or simply unusual moments. If any intersection of subject and topic could sell me on this format, Andre Agassi discussing the mullet of his heyday [MP3] can. Catch up on the show’s archives, and you’ll also hear Martin Scorsese on his jones for driving with the stereo on [MP3], Ricky Gervais on his yearning for jetpacks [MP3], and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke telling off the “wankers” [MP3] that evidently surround him.

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E14: Next Year, Jerusalem with Peter Orner

Friday, October 19, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights with Peter Orner, author of the novels Love and Shame and Love and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and the short story collection Esther Stories as well as co-editor of the nonfiction collections Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives and Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives. They discuss the heightened Americanness of Chicago and what it has offered his literary sensibility; our tendency as Americans, for good and ill, to chase stuff, whether in the city or the suburbs; his fascination with how life simply goes on amid grand (and possibly meaningless) power struggles; how, as a fresh college graduate, he found his was to Namibia; how his experience compares with the fictional Scottish doctor who falls in with Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, especially in the sense of the gnawing burden of non-belonging; life in a country where things slow down, and the space for thought that provides; how Namibia inspired him to write a story of a man lost in a Kafkanly inescapable shopping mall, and how he used a school’s sole typewriter to compose it; his constant aspirations to the condition of the short story collection, the “highest form,” and how even his novels secretly take that form; the experimentalism of great books that don’t seem experimental, like Bleak House or Moby Dick; how Namibia’s situation compares to that of Zimbabwe, and how many of Zimbabwe’s problems can be laid at the feet of Robert Mugabe; how he experiences a San Francisco beyond the Fisherman’s Wharves and the Transamerica Pyramids; and his criticism of the city’s increasing pricing out of families that leads, ultimately, to a loss of stories.

Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed or on iTunes.

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Seattle Diary II

Friday, October 19, 2012

Given its Space Needle-like role as a synecdoche for the city in major motion pictures and television shows, you might assume Pike Place Market amounts to to no more than Seattle’s own Times Square or Fisherman’s Wharf. Refreshingly, though, the place offers a robust enough selection of reasonably appealing businesses and lays close enough to downtown (even within downtown, depending on where you draw the lines) that almost as many locals as tourists mill around there. I’d always enjoyed visiting as a kid, when I lived twenty miles away, but I get the same kick out of it — a kick at a culinary angle, usually — now that I live 1200 miles away. But I come now with undeniable tourist status, confirmed by the Pike Place bookstore clerk who asked me where I was from before I so much as opened my mouth. I told him, and he asked if I was a celebrity. “Your secret’s safe with me,” he assured me when I said no.

He asked the girl who strolled in next the same question. “South Korea,” she replied. He asked where. “Seoul,” as almost every Korean tourist says. I then turned toward her and asked, in Korean, where specifically in Seoul. Though my command of the language barely counts as functional, she still made with the standard reaction of shock and amazement, covering her mouth and making a slightly strangled laugh-like noise. We continued to chat for a bit, and she got around to the other standard reaction: the question of why I could possibly want to learn her language. When I lived in Santa Barbara, struggling with whatever Korean materials I could come by, haltingly asking clarifying questions from the few Korean-speakers I encountered, and taking Japanese classes as a close-enough substitute, I could only shrug and mutter something suspiciously thin about liking Korean movies. Now, living in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, frequenting the Korean Cultural Center, eating Korean meals on the regular, and having a Korean girlfriend, I can come up with suspiciously many reasons. My interest in the country used to look weird; now the fact that I haven’t actually been there yet looks weird. How long can the world wait for Notebook on Cities and Culture: Seoul?

Half of my loose Seattle to-do list went untouched on this trip, a half which included revisiting Hosoonyi up in Edmonds, the cradle of my enthusiasm for Korean cuisine. (I first went there because it was a favorite of my high school girlfriend’s Korean mom and her sisters, a fact you can probably snap neatly into this whole narrative.) So I have a high priority for the next visit: trying once again their renditions of all the dishes that have since entered my life’s regular rotation. (Especially kimchi jjigae — it’s really good, it’s delicious.) Other targets for my next round of Seattle exploration include:

  1. Queen Anne, a neighborhood whose existence I barely recognized in my Washingtonian years but which bristled with pins whenever I looked up coffee shops on Yelp
  2. Wallingford, a neighborhood I mainly know as the current home of Archie McPhee, but which seems to have turned over the past decade into a Portlandesque paradise of food and drink
  3. University and Roosevelt Ways, my main Seattle hangouts (and, in their revival cinemas and video stores, the cradles of my cinephilia) as a high school student free to enjoy college-towniness while feeling only the grinding meaninglessness of high school rather than the overwhelming meaningless of college itself
  4. The still pretty new Link Light Rail line

Though I do feel faintly bummed about not getting to ride the Link, local friends assure me that I would have been hard pressed to find a reason to. Unless, of course, nobody could drive me to the airport. I guess that’s what Seattleites use it for: going to and from the airport, assuming they live near the tracks. Seattle has nevertheless wasted no time building this molehill of a benefit into a mountain of superciliousness with a marketing campaign built around a sensible-grandma-type figure called — wait for it — the Voice of Reason. This town, I thought to myself, face meeting palm.

(I didn’t have a chance to to ride the South Lake Union Transit streetcar, either, though it must have something going for it. Besides its acronym, I mean. Imagine the conceptual spokeswomen that generated.)

If Tao Lin couldn’t explain Seattle for you, maybe William Dietrich can. Almost ten years ago, he wrote an article for the Seattle Times called “A Tale of Three Cities“, and I think of it whenever I think about Seattle, Portland, or Vancouver:

With our Space Needle and sports teams, Pike Place Market and gorgeous geography, Boeing and Microsoft, Starbucks and Amazon, Seattle likes to think of itself as top dog in the Pacific Northwest. We’re trendy. Muscular. Diverse. Big.

But when it comes to livability, we seem stuck in first gear and our neighbors are more than a little condescending. Seattle’s OK, they say, but a little crass. Yokels on planning. Bumpkins on design.

“Seattle has an ethic of passivity,” says Portland developer John Russell. “People throw up their hands and say there’s nothing we can do.”

[ … ]

Sound Transit is run by a board of local officials from King, Pierce and Snohomish counties whose elected allegiance is to their individual jurisdiction, not the metro area. Moreover, transit dollars are split to be spent in five separate sub-regions that, while promoting “equity,” starve the effort to get rail started at its logical but expensive core — Seattle — so it can later radiate outward.

To make matters worse, Seattle has a frequently-warring, strong mayor-strong council form of city government. By contrast, Portland’s tiny council of a mayor and four commissioners means just three votes are needed for a decision. Moreover, each commissioner is given oversight of city departments like a cabinet minister, making them directly responsible for bureaucratic performance.

Hence what I’ve come to consider one of Seattle’s main advantages: convenient placement between its northerly and southerly PNW metropolis neighbors. But you still tend to have to drive between them. Then again, that goes for much of the greater Seattle area itself. The region’s agonizing (and shockingly recent) struggles even to decide what sort of rapid transit to build come across most entertainingly in Peter Bagge’s comic “My Very Own Monorail“. Despite composing it for the libertarian magazine Reason, he doesn’t come off as particularly doctrinaire on transit issues. I’ll invite him on my show (for a third interview!) when I get to recording Notebook in Seattle. You’ll hear more.

(I did try to ride the Seattle Center Monorail, but it doesn’t accept whale cards.)

Aside from its governmental and geographical tangles, I’ve long sensed that Seattle suffers from especially unhealthy city-suburb relations. Part of this comes from having grown up in one of these suburbs; part of it comes from feeling like they conspire to deflect me from the city itself. I lived in a ‘burb eighteen miles out of downtown; went to high school in a ‘burb thirteen miles out of it; learned to love Korean food in a ‘burb fourteen miles out of it; stayed with a friend this trip in a ‘burb ten miles out of it; and made a grueling 90-minute  ‘burb-to-‘burb bus journey to meet another friend for a three-beer lunch (which is to say, a lunch consisting of three beers). Amid all this ‘burbing, I heard several different people speculate about exactly how many feet of shattered glass in which, when The Big One inevitably comes, downtown Seattle will find itself choked. Small price to pay, I’d say.

Still, make your connections and you can have fun in a few of these far-flung municipalities. Why, in one of them (eighteen miles out!) I met Colin Williamson, for years my very favorite writer at PCGamer magazine — which, during the years I read PCGamer, pretty much meant my favorite writer. As the only genuinely funny reviewer on staff, he got thrown the obvious duds, especially the high-profile obvious duds. The last piece I read from him, on Jon Romero’s long-delayed Daikatana, survives only as a forum post. (The magazine hasn’t exactly taken pains to keep its archives available.) It turns out that Colin’s life after game journalism involved a decade in Japan, studying and working in game production. He spent a goodly chunk of this time in the western Kansai region, and specifically the city of Osaka — where I shall find my own self two weeks from now! If you’re of the Nipponophile/gamer/student-abroad bent, you have a fascinating read ahead in his blog Colin’s House of Shame, where he recounts his journey from rural Pennsylvania to enrolling in Kansai Gaidai to taking film classes with the Donald Richie (“Yeah, I’d always see him going around with different girls on his arms.” “… girls?“) at Temple University to laboring away for various Japanese game developers.

Buying alcohol in Seattle brought back memories. I remember accompanying my dad to the local liquor stores in childhood, and only now, filled with southern Californian drinking experience, do I wonder about these images. Spartan in their wood-grain decor, utilitarian in their organization and presentation, and early in their closing hour, these shops seemed conceptually imported from East Germany or worse. Only years later did I learn that the state actually did run them: by Washington law, nobody else could sell the hard stuff. The repeal of this law not long ago has allowed friends who remained Seattleites to feel their hand tremble as it descends, for the first time, on a bottle of vodka right there in the QFC. But many of these former state sellers, especially the ones out in the sticks, still feel vaguely Soviet, and people complain of the kind of taxes on alcohol that make five-dollar transit passes sound like a bargain. It seemingly went off as one of those fumbled law-loosenings, like British Rail in the nineties, that offers the citizenry a cherished opportunity to gripe about both the public and the private sector. Far grimmer evidence of Washington’s squirreliness over the drink appears in its strip clubs, which sell only eight-dollar Cokes and, if you’re lucky, six-dollar Kool-Aids. You’ll have more fun watching patrons periodically duck out to their cars to surreptitiously pound a fortifying Steel Reserve.

But heed my words: wherever you buy it, if you burn through the Grey Goose, don’t follow it up in desperation with the dregs of a bottle of Smirnoff’s fluffed marshmallow. Only the most intense phở can treat the resulting hangover. Fortunately, if you roam around greater Seattle, you’ll find a hell of a lot of it.

 

[Previous diaries: Portland 2012, San Francisco 2012, Mexico City 2011]

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E13: Greatly Great Music with Cariwyl Hebert

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens with Cariwyl Hebert, founder of the community-based classical music appreciation society Salon97. They discuss New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross’ hatred of “classical music”; her project of pretension removal and safe-place creation; how she identified a need in the way her work in classical music proved a reliable conversation-ender; developing and implementing the idea of the classical listening party around which  Salon97 is now based; listening party themes that draw attention and/or create tension, and how she strikes the correct balance between too schmaltzy and not schmaltzy enough; having to begin musical discussions with pure opinion, and bringing out the controversial lives of the composers to generate discussion; returning the social aspect to classical music, by beer, wine, or other means; what, exactly, a composer can infuse their music with while keeping it “classical”; the life of the classical music enthusiast in San Francisco, whether or not it crosses into competitive culture-vulturing; what  a Salon97 listening party is actually like, versus Ross’ experience of the concert hall; why we sat down at our concerts in the Victorian era and never stood back up; the casualizing influence of the tech industry and how it opens up the various levels of San Francisco culture; and how you can watch Mozart doing stuff.

Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed or on iTunes.

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